What's coming in HTML5

Back in 1999 when the HTML 4.01 standard first appeared, virtually nobody envisioned video blogs, social networking sites, or Internet office tools. The upcoming HTML 5 standard will remake the web for the new generation of technologies and services.

By 2004, social network architects and web application developers knew that the HTML 4.01 standard was long out of date. The Document Object Model (DOM 2) standard for language-independent interaction with HTML objects was even worse. In the five years since these standards had been ratified, a generational shift had occurred in the web development industry, giving rise to new techniques for dynamic content, multimedia, and semantic processing. Representatives from Mozilla, Opera, and Apple, tired of waiting for progress, founded the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) to explore the possibility of an updated web standard.